Page 193 of These Tears

I need to step back.

I should. I ought to gather whatever is left of my dignity from the wet tiles with both hands and run away.

But he is… Elias.

Without letting myself weigh the rights and wrongs, I sink slowly to my knees, my hands curling around the hard muscle of his legs. In that moment, I am not the thing he has cornered. I am not the body he has pulled apart under the shower.

And I dare to look.

No—

I claim the sight.

The wet line of his stomach. The held-back power in his thighs. The hand that still does not quite know whether to reach for me or keep to the wall. The size of him. Heavy and glorious.

Beautiful is too soft a word for him.

I’m almost outraged at how much perfection can be packed into a single body.

I have heard him threaten. I have heard him laugh. I have heard him disguise cruelty as philosophy and turn silence into a weapon.

I have never heard him sound as breakable as now, breathing rough above me and keeping the one thing he wants to ask clenched tight between his teeth.

And my lips part for him. I let him have the last choice.

He hesitates. Wars with himself.

But in this instant, there’s no mercy left in me. No noble reason I can polish later and call it something else.

I am wet. Shaking. Furious. Blistering with need.

My tongue extends and runs a small line over the tip of him. The muscles in his jaw ripple as he grits his teeth harder.

But… he finally tips his hips forward by a fraction.

I swirl my tongue around him until I coax a tremble from his spine, and he moves the hand still propped against the wall to reposition himself.

His fingers stay wrapped around his base, controlling what little movement he allows when his crown barely brushes my lips.

His thighs begin to shiver. His shoulders bow slightly, his breath catches and stays caught.

A dark, reckless part of me rises to meet it.

I lean in before this need can sour into sense, and I take him into my mouth as far as I can.

The curse that falls from him cracks the air. His other palm slams against the tiles. The sound that follows might be protest, but I can’t hear him over the water gushing beneath us.

He doesn’t move away, though. He doesn’t stop me as I take him in and out of my mouth, dragging him to the edge.

My eyes peel open. His head is tipped back, water spraying up into the ceiling from the upturned showerhead and streaming down his sinewy throat, following the lines of ink into damnation.

Every hard ridge of his abdomen draws tight. The tension climbs into his chest beneath the black chains, his breath snagging somewhere behind his teeth. And he grits through the last of the tremors as he spills inside my mouth.

I drink the sin straight from the source.

The room loses all sound except the traitorous rush of the water as the final rumble rolls out of his throat and the shaking slows. Then stops entirely.

I lean against the wall, too aware of myself, of the intimacy, of what I’ve just chosen, and what he let happen.